Nobody should have to explain ancient Hebrew literary symbolism, but Moses would laugh at the silly idea the early chapters of Genesis should be taken entirely literally. Today the churches in the West suffer under the lash of hateful literalism, an implacable demand which arises from the very nature of sin and the Fall.
Whatever else it meant, the story of The Serpent and Eve and the Fruit of the Tree tells us about the appeal to a trio of weaknesses built into human flesh. The phrase "good for food" symbolizes the lust of the flesh, appetites which must be restrained, lest they seek fulfillment in ways God condemns. That issue of being beautiful to look at matches the lust of the eyes, the demand of the mind to see things and know things, to taste and test the limits of a thing, to plumb the depths and conquer it all. The business of "making one wise" correlates to the boastful pride of life, or more accurately, the pride of fallen flesh to be one's own god, a demand to have control over things God did not place in our hands.
Taken together, they all were used as lustful appeals to bring Eve to the place where she accepted Satan's challenge that she begin deciding for herself what was good and what was evil, rather than trusting in God's revelation. In her unfallen state, that trust would have meant a living and active reliance on the Spirit communing with her spirit to inform the mind how to respond to any context and situation so as to please the Father Creator. The mind was given only as the means to organizing a response to the impulses of the Spirit against the impulses of the flesh. The mind is not equipped to actually grasp and know what is right and wrong in the absolute sense.
The early human cultures after expulsion from the Garden divided into those who took the fleshly route and those who pursued the spiritual -- Sons of Men versus Sons of God. Scripture is devoted to the tale of how this thing devolved ever more into the victories of Satan in pulling men away from the spiritual plane. The early culture of the Sons of God involves a heavy dose of what modern Western man calls "mysticism" -- using the term as a means to dismiss this concern for spiritual things, the spiritual approach. The Ancient Hebrew culture was mystical in orientation, though it fully understood the fleshly approach. It was not that Hebrew people didn't understand the sort of logic which was codified by Aristotle; it was that they understood its limits. It was okay to use it in formulating ways to obey the truth, but utterly powerless at finding and defining truth.
Jesus battled with the Pharisees over this very thing. The Jews of His day had some three centuries before surrendered to the allure of Aristotle, that Siren call to seize the throne of the will with the intellect, to presume handling truth accurately simply by human logic. While the Talmud was not yet a written document in His days, and had not yet gained its name, Jesus knew it all too well as "traditions of men" as opposed to traditions of the Spirit as revealed in Hebrew Scripture. He spoke of how they used their Hellenized logic as the means to disemboweling the spiritual power of the Law of Moses. They had dismissed the objective of the Law, which was to indicate there was a higher plane, a higher way of knowing, a spiritual realm which was beyond telling. Instead, they made their human intellectual understanding of the Law as "the Word of God" and threw away the spiritual element entirely. It was very much a religion of man, as Judaism remains today. It uses the words of Scripture, but is not the Word, the revelation of God. When Jesus pointed out the flaws, they killed Him rather than discuss it. They had it all worked out, and to contradict them was to contradict God Himself, as they saw it.
The Pharisees were the quintessence of the fallen approach to things. The Judiazers were a sect of ostensibly Christian Jews seeking to bring the church back under Pharisaical literalism. Paul could see it coming. He had been so careful to stay with the teachings of Christ, the mystical understanding Jesus taught. Everywhere he went, the Judaizers followed. For the most part, they won. That is, wherever a church was organized, they took over the organization politically. Once John as the last Apostle was in the ground, the change followed quickly. Aside from a precious few who understood, the whole of Christian scholarship eventually drifted into the camp of the Judaizers. By 600 AD, the politics saw the public face of Christian faith wholly controlled by what amounts to Christian Pharisees, and the message of truth became marginalized.
Throughout Church History, we catch glimpses of this truth resurfacing here and there, but always quickly squashed by those in authority. Jesus was crucified again and again. The power of the Spirit, wholly outside the grasp and power of the human mind, was forbidden again and again. Despite lip service to the contrary, most modern churches are in various ways, and to various degrees, still under the Judaizing influence of literalism. Even the liberal churches are off course, simply because they are a reaction to the Pharisees, and it is the Pharisees who define the grounds for debate. Precious few make any effort to sweep away the mistakes of their predecessors, too respectful of men and their follies. Jesus died for those follies. The modern liberal church is simply the modern Sadducees.
The truth carries the power of God. Thus has it ever been, and where men fail to confine that power, His truth spreads like wildfire. In our Post-modern collapsing Western Civilization, while most of the fuel is still very damp, we have some hope the fire will spread again. We have been warned in John's Apocalypse it would always be confined, more and more to ever smaller congregations, ever more thinly scattered over the face of humanity, but never quite extinguished. When things seem at their worst, that is when the Lord will come back. I don't think we're quite there, yet, though no man can know at what point God thinks we are there. Jesus as His Son on the earth didn't know, because the Father alone decides.
But to those who have tasted this divine power of truth, something no man can control or really understand, there are no words for the fire that burns within. We do what we can to share it abroad, and most of the world gets only a tiny slice of it. Those who are in power fear and hate it, because it eviscerates their control over their fellow humans. How many pastors, ruling in their churches, slander this spiritual mysticism as a threat to the Body? Whether they admit it to themselves of not, it's really only a threat to their false sense of control over the things of God. The notion of "propositional truth" is an awful fallacy, for if something can be stated as a proposition, it cannot be truth. It can only be a limited response of the human mind to a living revelation ineffable.
It's the false sense of control of truth, that they can somehow get it and master it in their minds, that constitutes the allure today of intellectual Christianity. This is the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
By Ed Hurst
12 June 2011
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